Safe Houses We Have Known
by qaftsiel
Summary: As strands of an ever-tightening web are discovered, the events across the Atlantic, over the Channel, and in Whitehall itself may be closer to home than anyone expected. Full summary inside.
1. Chapter 1

Slowly abandoned to his uncle's bumbling care, Archie finds a friend in the quiet, limping man living in the old groundsmaster's house across the pitch.

The Director is dead and, as fingers are pointed and heads roll, MI6 is struggling to reorganise itself in the aftermath of disaster. Janine Hawkins, caught in the crossfire, just wants to keep her job and her secrets.

Bereaved and unmoored, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson attend the reading of a will, only to discover something that may well be even more disquieting than the losses they'd suffered.

In the process of trying to make sense of it all, each stumbles across a strand in an intricate, dangerous web, one that is slowly tightening as events across the Atlantic, over the Channel, and in Whitehall itself unfold.

* * *

Hello, all.

It's been a long time since I've posted anything- in the process of moving to northern Chicago and finding employment, I've only just begun to find time to write.

This is probably going to be a long one, and I can't say I'll be able to post regularly or quickly. I'm very excited about it, however, and I sincerely hope you enjoy this opening chapter.

* * *

Chapter 1: Archie

Sunday came blanketed in a morning fog.

It was one of those fogs, dripping down windows and hanging in the air as dense as an untold secret—the sort of fog that reduced the real things in the world to yourself, the ground beneath your feet, and whatever you could reach out to and feel with your own two hands. Lights over damp pavements and doors hung in fuzzy constellations so nebulous that even the tenured teachers might have had trouble telling which light belonged to which building, were they awake to do so. As it was, with three hours yet before breakfast and no last-minute preparations for classes to knock any of the teachers up before sunrise, it was really a stroke of poor luck that saw Archie West awake early enough to notice it when a light came on in the Hobbit-hole's window.

The Hobbit-hole was not really a hobbit-hole, of course. In its early, far more prosperous days, Rudbridge's campus had included gardens and an orchard, stables, and a pitch for rugby or cricket or whatever happened to be the game du jour at that time. Like every other wealthy preparatory academy with such a campus, there had been a groundskeeper, and like every other particularly wealthy preparatory academy with such a campus, there had been a small, neat cottage just off the far side of the pitch in which to house said groundskeeper. The days of groundskeepers had long since passed, but the little house remained, and though there was a sign in front of it that read 'Groundskeeper', it hardly stopped the younger students from reimagining its origins and occupants. For a while, according to the year seven students, it had been a wizard's hut that only seemed empty because of the wizard's charms and spells on the place; last year, after a corking new Bond movie had come out, it had become the nondescript entry to a sprawling underground complex run by MI6, and anyone who went in got their memories of gadgets and supercomputers replaced with dusty floors and cobwebs. The latest imagining was probably a result of Mr Millby's movie day after his creative writing class finished reading The Hobbit and the fact that the house, like Bilbo's house, had a green door.

Even knowing that the house really was just an empty building maintained more out of respect to the past than for any practical reason, the presence of someone where there shouldn't have been anyone was enough to propel Archie out of bed, into his clothes, and out into the half-dark. He paused every now and then, straining his eyes and ears toward the house, and then resumed his approach, cringing every time his trainers squeaked in the damp grass. Soon, he came to the muddy drive up to the house; there he found tire tracks but no car, a single set of footprints, and a series of holes that hugged one side of the prints. He knew that it was possible to identify what sort of shoe someone was wearing by looking at their footprints— Sherlock had told him as much when explaining the dead nun— but all he could see was that the person had big shoes with pointy toes, a bit like his Dad's work shoes. Nevertheless, he followed the prints to the doorstep and then slowly, slowly edged along the wall, inching his way over until he was peering into the window.

"Social conventions prescribe a knock at the door when visiting someone's home," said a soft voice from Archie's left.

Archie jerked and whipped his head around, freezing in place. The tall man standing in the open door of the Hobbit-hole stared back. He wondered how the man had opened the door so quietly. "H-hello, sir. I was… just…"

"Investigating, no doubt, the light from my sitting room," the man said, looking down his nose at Archie and thumping his cane on the doorstep as if to punctuate his statement. "Come in, please, and pray take off your shoes."

The Hobbit-hole was a very different place when lit and lived-in. Empty beer bottles and cigarette butts were nowhere to be seen. Instead, a huge, plush Oriental rug in reds and blues and golds had been spread over the wood floor of the front room; on it stood matched leather chairs with shiny brass rivets, a heavy wooden coffee table with legs carved to resemble snarling lions, and a stately antique lamp with swirls and tassels on the shade. The oaken bookshelves that had sat empty and covered in graffiti for years were polished to a rich, silky shine and full of what must have been hundreds of books, nearly all with golden letters on their leather spines. Many were in other languages— Archie was sure he recognised Chinese on one and Russian on another. Except for the books, though, the inside of the Hobbit-hole looked as if someone had decorated it using the pictures from one of the house magazines Archie's mum loved to look at and sigh over. There were paintings here and there, but they were just mountains and sitting medieval ladies and a soldier with lots of medals on his red uniform and a sheathed saber over his shoulder. There were no pictures of the man, of his family, or even of a pet.

Even so, the man fit in the place, like he had been born amongst soft leather and polished dark wood and old, big books. He wore navy blue trousers that had perfectly straight creases down the legs just like in the movies and a matching waistcoat, and he had funny little bracelets over the sleeves of his collared shirt that sat just above his elbows. His clothes looked like the kind that Archie had been forced to wear to Dr John and Miss Mary's wedding, but instead of looking itchy and uncomfortable in them, the man seemed as comfortable as if wearing pajamas. He wasn't a skinny man, not like Mr Livingston the upper maths teacher, but he wasn't large, either, and he didn't quite have all of his brown hair. His eyes were sharp and dark— as he looked closely at Archie standing next to the chair, it seemed for a moment that those eyes were looking right through his skull and into his brain like a book. "I-I'm sorry to bother you, sir."

The man's expression didn't change, but he did huff out a little breath, a bit like a laugh. Leaning heavily on his wooden cane as he walked, so that his footsteps were more of a labored tap-thump, tap-thump, the man went to the lion table and poured a second cup of tea from the service sitting atop it on a silver tray. Two slices of toast spread with what looked like honey were carefully arranged on a small plate. "There is a chair in the kitchen. Fetch it and join me for breakfast."

Archie hurried to do as he was bid; he was half-convinced that he was in the presence of some sort of wizard or spymaster and this was just a test to decide whether to let him live or turn him to dust where he stood. Wrapping his arms around the wooden back of the chair, he wrestled the unwieldy, heavy thing into the sitting room, edging around tables and other furniture before lowering it to the floor next to the lion table. The man set a second plate of tea and toast on the table in front of Archie once he was seated. Archie wondered if it meant he'd passed the test.

"I admit that I was surprised to see someone your age," the man said after delicately chasing a bite of toast with a sip of his tea. "I was given to understand that this was a secondary school."

Archie looked down at his hands, still creased a bit by the carvings of the chair, and fiddled anxiously as he finished chewing. "I'm not a student here."

His very rich stepfather must have been quite convincing after the wedding two years ago, because it had only taken Steve about a week to talk Archie's mum into leaving Archie with his uncle at Rudbridge's so she could go off on 'Business Trips' with him. It wasn't terrible—Archie had a whole dorm room to himself with a bunk bed and a huge window and no curfew—but he did miss seeing his mum every day, and her phone calls weren't as frequent as they had been during the last trip, and the trips just seemed to get longer and longer every time. He'd spent the last winter hols at Rudbridge's; there were some shells and a painted boomerang on his bookshelf now, with love from Mummy and Steve from Melbourne!, and a book on anatomy from Sherlock Holmes with lots of pictures and scribbled notes in the margins. He still couldn't tell which one it had surprised him more to receive. Mostly he just wondered if things would be different if he fought being sent to Uncle Ulysses next time, and did his best to fend off the creeping suspicion that Steve really hadn't been very convincing at all. He knew he reminded Mum of his dad; sometimes she looked at him and just… closed up.

The man was watching Archie with that see-through look again; he nodded with such understanding in his expression that Archie wondered if he'd accidentally spoken aloud. "I cannot honestly say I would have chosen to come here, either." Something about his cool, quiet expression shifted minutely and suddenly it was a warm, quiet expression. "What is your name, child?"

Archie swallowed another bite of the toast and honey. "Archie." When the man didn't respond immediately, he floundered a bit. "Er. Archibald West, sir."

The man smiled. "Archibald. A strong name— you should be very proud."

"It's weird," Archie huffed reflexively, and then winced. "Sorry, sir."

Instead of getting angry, the man merely flicked one hand dismissively. "People are rarely kind to those they regard as being different, Archibald, and it is very unusual for their reasoning to have any basis in logic or fact. This holds true for adults as well as children." Archie suspected that was meant to be reassuring, as it sounded a lot like some of the things Sherlock had said when Archie mentioned the other kids making fun of him at school. Instead of saying it out of long practice, however, something told Archie that the man believed what he was saying without question.

For a moment, the man went quiet as he stared through the fireplace. Archie stilled his swinging legs and even stopped chewing— the man looked sad in the same way that Sherlock sometimes did, like he was somewhere very far away in his brain where things had been happy, or at least better than they were. It always seemed… wrong, somehow, to keep doing whatever he was doing when someone looked like that. After a long, quiet wait, the man dropped a hand to his right leg and massaged it gingerly. "You and I are rather alike, Archibald."

"We are, sir?" The idea that he might have something in common with this man, with his posh clothes and his limp and his wizard's eyes, was as surprising as it was pleasing.

"Yes indeed." Archie almost looked away when the man turned from the fire and met his gaze, but something kept his eyes locked on those piercing, dark ones. "We stand apart, you and I, through no choice of our own," the man said softly, sadly, fiercely. "We stand apart and, perforce, we notice."

* * *

Uncle Ulysses had much to say on the subject of the man in the Hobbit-hole. "It's ruddy irregular, is what it is," he huffed darkly around the stem of his pipe. Uncle Ulysses was one of those men who very sorely wanted everything to be regular. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner took place atprecise intervals, queues were orderly, lessons were taught properly, and everything was done according to strict, regular protocols, no exceptions. Naturally, this meant that every irregularity was yet another incontrovertible sign of the crumbling moral rectitude of the nation. Uncle Ulysses was a stalwart bastion of regularity in a disorderly moral void, a lonely crusader from a time of sense and sensibility. He was also one of the biggest idiots Archie had ever met, and Archie's classmate Donnie ate glue when he thought no one was looking.

"We needed a replacement for Saunders," said Mr Millby, twirling a pencil over long, clever fingers. "With exams right around the corner, none of us have the time to cover his class when his curriculum's all but illegible."

Smoke billowed from Uncle Ulysses' nostrils, making him look a bit like a darkly-mustachioed dragon. "That we did, but it's irregular, Wes, hiring a man after that interview. Why, my Archie could have got the job if he'd stood for it that day!" He thumped Archie's back and Archie barely avoided spilling his orange juice all over the table. "Who is he, anyway? Never seen a man limp like that unless he'd been shot, and where the hell does a man get shot in old Blighty, I ask? Nowhere, not unless he's up to no good!"

"I heard Mr Rudbridge say something about America," Miss Laurence the secretary added breathlessly. "They've all got guns over there, you know, guns and rights." This was said decisively; clearly Americans possessing both guns and 'rights' was enough to convict them of the crime. Next to her, Sister Constance had her palm halfway to her face before she caught herself and redirected it, propping her chin and attempting to look serious and thoughtful. Just as it was generally known that Miss Laurence was hired primarily for her phenomenal talent for organisation, it was widely understood that Sister Constance, an Ignatian nun, had been hired for her tireless logic and intellect. It was also widely understood that Sister Constance's religion was all that kept her from taking Rudbridge's resident idiots off at the knees every time they opened their mouths. Archie hid his face in his second breakfast; his uncle, being one of those idiots, had apparently interpreted Sister Constance's pained expression as support for his rant instead of the exasperation it was.

Puffed up with righteous agitation at the mere mention of Americans, Uncle Ulysses chomped at his pipe and furrowed his brow and straightened in his chair with a grunt of disapproval. "Americans!" he spat in distaste, and then said it again: "Americans!" In a world gone mad, Americans were the ones opening the door to let the bull into the china shop, the ultimate offence to all things properly ordered. "No interview, shows up at six on a Saturday, mysterious limps, and now Americans! I say he's no good, no good at all— mark my words, that man is trouble with a capital T!" he declared with a sharp rap of his fist on the table. Someone at the other end muttered 'and that rhymes with P', drawing stifled chuckles from Mr Millby and Miss Gurnee the drama teacher, which only incensed Uncle Ulysses further. "His CV's blank as a slate! Graduated from the University of London in '88 with top marks and a doctorate, and then faffed off to nowhere for twenty-seven years. No publications, no teaching, nothing— and now all the sudden he's here after a round of QI and a cuppa? I want to know what a man does for three decades that doesn't show up on his damn résumé!"

Archie clenched his jaw and very deliberately did not mention Mr Thornton the ex-chemistry teacher and his recreational research, Ms Scorese and the inch-thick file the Interpol agent had given Mr Rudbridge, or Mr Dean and the unlocked lockbox full of jewellry, silver picture frames, bone china, smartphones, and school silverware a pair of prankster students had found in his desk drawer—they had all been as regular as church on Sundays, according to Uncle Ulysses. Listening to some of the things his uncle was saying, however, Archie decided that he wouldn't stay quiet. The man in the Hobbit-hole was like him, alone because people made him alone, and Archie wasn't about to let his uncle add to that. "It could have been a car accident," he said, loudly enough to cut through Uncle Ulysses's bashing-on.

"What's that?"

Sitting up, Archie met his uncle's gaze and, for the sake of damage control, put on his best 'innocent boy trying to talk with the grown-ups' face. "Well if he's got a bad limp, maybe he was in a car accident, like Monty in Year Five." Monty in Year Five didn't exist. What did exist was the anatomy book with Sherlock's scribbles that described all the ways a broken femur played out in the long term based on how badly it was broken, but Uncle Ulysses didn't think much of facts from books he hadn't read. "He's got a cane and a limp and everything. His mum said he'd have it for the rest of his life."

The pipe dipped a bit as Uncle Ulysses stared down at Archie. "I suppose that's possible," he ventured gruffly, visibly caught off-guard. He never did know how to respond to the Innocent Boy sham, for all of his bluster and arrogance around other adults— his regard for Archie hovered somewhere between a teacher's interest in an intelligent pupil and a baffled, paternal protectiveness, which was just enough that he would cut off his rants if Archie put himself in opposition. "You mustn't hang about him, though, Archie. Haven't got the measure of him yet. It's all very irregular, you see. Got to be careful."

Archie nodded dutifully. Across the table, Sister Constance lifted an eyebrow.


	2. Chapter 2

"It's unthinkable," Gracie sighed. She licked the tip of one finger and ran it around the inside of the rim of her margarita glass, returning it to her mouth and suckling affectedly. "They have all those elections and then they can't even pull themselves together to deal with that_ budget _of theirs. Ugh, the interviews have been so boring."

Janine made an empathizing sound and nodded. "Party lines and little else. It's hateful." Not that Janine did much interviewing any more, at least in person. In the departmental shuffle after the perfect shitstorm that had been Atlanta, Development had been kind enough to provide her with an intern to do the interviewing, which let her 'maintain ongoing obligations with the Department of Logistics'. In plain English, that translated to 'we made a hash of anticipating problems with your placement so we're making it sound like it's Logistics' fault'. The Minister of Logistics at the time had not been best pleased, but the aftermath of Atlanta had put a halt to most interdepartmental quibbles as everyone focussed on damage control.

Gracie crinkled her nose delicately. "It's all denouncement and distancing until it means siding with the other party—I can't get them to break ranks!" This was said with a pout and a huff; it was very, very unusual that Gracie couldn't wriggle, provoke, or outright bully her way behind party lines, especially after her promotion following Kitty Riley's predictable implosion had given her yet more latitude to exercise her formidable talent for inveiglement.

The truth of it was, the only thing more frightening than Gracie's manipulative faculty was the extent of her network of connections. She was one of those people that everyone in the business knew to tread softly around; Thea over in Education had once said that getting an invitation from Gracie Whipple was like finding yourself in bed with a black mamba on a cold day. She wasn't wrong, either—though Gracie had merely played witness to the untimely deaths of hundreds of political careers and celebrity reputations, she was personally responsible for dozens and had enough blackmail material at her fingertips to more than triple that number. Even Charles, Janine-the-freelancer's boss and a man who had elevated blackmail to something approaching an art form, had handled her with kid gloves.

"See if you can't get to a few of the lobbyists, or maybe someone higher up in one of their little campaign armies," Janine suggested. She was loathe to give genuinely good advice to someone like Gracie—Research and Development hated it when a particularly incisive column or exposé made their marks clam up— but her orders were very clear: Gracie was to be kept happy, busy, and incurious with regards to Janine, even if it meant spooking the cattle. "Maybe mention the currency thing. You were saying you had a real corker of a column on that, weren't you?"

Gracie was cunning enough to recognize sound advice when she heard it. For just a moment, her girlish, playful pretence faltered as she visibly shifted gears, and then it was back again, this time with a mouth full of too-even white teeth and eyes that glinted with delighted, predatory purpose. It was not difficult to keep her focussed on her new project, and Janine was able to whittle away the rest of the two hours Gracie had scheduled by carefully feeding the fire she'd lit.

Emerging from the pub into a brisk, damp March night, Janine closed her eyes and kept walking despite the sudden sensation that her legs had turned to jelly beneath her. She would submit another request to enact one of the exit strategies in Janine-the-freelancer's architecture; if Gracie ever got past the paperwork smokescreens and planted references, Atlanta would look like a beach vacation in the Seychelles in comparison, and Janine would be blamed for all of it. Then again, with Gracie reaching out to Janine personally and professionally, the exit strategies might draw too much attention to Janine-the-freelancer, leading to Gracie uncovering it all anyway. 'Fucking ridiculous,' Jerry Sharp had called it, and Janine was inclined to agree, even if she was feeling pressured enough to doubt his decision to keep her in place. At this point, the best she could do was trust his judgement— they couldn't afford any more doubt, not when everyone was finally starting to stifle the fires of paranoia and finger-pointing after the Atlanta disaster.

It wasn't even that the Director hadn't given them ample time to scout ahead before he scheduled the trip. In fact, he'd given them even more time than they were used to having, which was probably why it was such a shock when it all went horribly wrong— there simply hadn't been anyrumblings of extraordinary trouble. The Russians and the Chinese had been too busy trying to contain the spread of IS to extremist Chechen and Uighur factions, Iran was besieged on all sides by the same group, North Korea hadn't given up harping on the 'bird-eating Westerners' as Kim Jong-un grew progressively more rotund… every conceivable interceptable communication had pointed to it being a low-risk trip. Janine did know that the Director had been suspicious of something to do with the Americans and the intelligence coming out of Washington, DC, and it wasn't unusual for the Director to go out to meet with sources under the guise of 'strengthening ties of friendship and alliance between the nations' or some such tripe, but, combined with the apparent safety of the trip, the dirty bomb planted in the foundation of the Director's hotel may as well have been a bolt out of the blue.

Dirty bombs being what they were, Logistics' retrieval teams never did recover the Director's body. The two bodyguards accompanying him were gone, too—Hatshepsut had been as close to an island as anyone, but Athena… it had hurt, calling the doctor and lying to him through her teeth, listening to the horrified silence on the other end of the line. She had left calling the Director's next-of-kin to Thea— the two had been much closer, after all, and Janine's hands had been full as Research recalled their highest-tier agents and set them to work combing the Archives for any and every indicator they might have missed.

It didn't take very long at all for heads to start rolling. Patel, who had been Hatshepsut and Athena's handler as well as being responsible for a third of Development's American South placements, was raked over several beds of coals before being turned out to the streets with a severance check and his name on a watch-list; according to George Brentwood and evidence from the tribunal, he'd been doctoring intelligence reports before passing them up to the computers in Education. Patel's surviving agents were recalled, too; one or two managed to get minor desk jobs, but the others were put out to pasture in remote parts of Scotland, never to be heard from again except for in the bimonthly reports. Though the problem should have been resolved by that point, Brentwood, desperate to displace at least some of the blame for the lapse, pressured Thea and Jerry to run an inquiry into the computers responsible for analyzing Patel's product. Three weeks later, Janine had been relegated to Probationary Logistics Coordinator, Ranah had been sentenced to typist's duties for someone in Community, and Uma had been shipped off to some tiny investigative office in Cardiff.

All in all, Janine had come out of it relatively unscathed; Logistics Coordinator wasn't too far removed from her old work as a computer with Education, and Janine-the-freelancer let her relive her days as one of Development's deep-cover agents before Education had snapped her up for her analytical skills. Still, the implication that she had either ignored or failed to recognise the signs of Patel's doctoring smarted— she was nothing if not meticulous, and Patel had been good enough that she hadn't noticed anything remotely off about the product he had passed along. She wasn't so proud that she couldn't admit her failure, though, so she'd accepted her lot and resolved to do her best to make up for her lapse.

Old Mr Chaseley lifted his book in greeting as Janine unlatched the back gate to her townhouse's cramped front yard. "Evening, Miss Hawkins." Once upon a time, he had been Logistics' best extraction expert; now, he maintained a near-constant vigil over the row from his battered rocking chair in his little yard, book in hand and radio at his feet. In the yellowish light from the lamp he kept next to his chair, the skin over the left side of his face resembled a jumbled sea of dunes seen from above. "Long night, was it?"

Janine chuckled and shrugged. "No longer than usual." She leaned on the cast-iron fence separating their patches of grass. "Is the book any good?"

Chaseley tipped the book back and forth. "Acceptable. Not wrong about Mossad and what it used to be able to do before that buffoon took over," he remarked. He held no love for Benjamin Netanyahu or the brand of nationalist orthodoxy that had driven his mother out of a land she had hoped to call 'home' after the horror of Auschwitz. He shrugged— they had discussed the Israel situation many, many times— and waved a hand to dismiss the topic. "You know the old song and dance, hey? Go inside and rest. Your friend was cooking earlier, some sort of roast. Smelled fantastic, it did."

"Friend?" Janine asked, ignoring her heart as it seemed to freeze in her chest.

"Lovely young lady," Mr Chaseley agreed. He stood up from his chair with unexpected agility for his age and withdrew a small slip of paper from his book that Janine had earlier taken for a bookmark. "She said I was to give you this before you went in for the night."

Janine accepted the slip of paper and unfurled it.

_Let's have dinner._

* * *

I should have the third chapter up within the next two weeks. I'm in the process of editing it now. :)

Also: I'm not sure I mentioned this, but I was at the Gillette to Brett IV Sherlockian conference in Bloomington, Indiana (my hometown), last weekend. I could go on and on about all the fantastic talks, screenings, showcases, and people I met, but I'll be very brief- if you should have an opportunity to attend a Sherlockian conference of any sort, *do it*. I've never had so much excellent conversation, nor have I ever made so many friends in just one weekend. It was easily one of the most entertaining, intellectually satisfying experiences I've had.

Also also, shout out to Mel! Hope life is treating you well. :)


	3. Chapter 3

Apologies for the long wait. I've been working overtime, and I'm so tired by the time I get home that I fall asleep before I get much writing done. On top of that, I think I rewrote this chapter at least four different times. I'm happy enough with it now, but it's been far too long in the works.

Again, deepest apologies for the wait. I hope it's worth it. :)

* * *

Except for the whirs and clicks of the gas chromatographer slotting a sample into place, the lab at Bart's was quiet when Sherlock pushed through the door. Surprised, Molly looked up from her work and furrowed her brow at him. "Sherlock," she said, not with hostility but certainly not with the adoration of years past. "Why are you here? I don't have any weird ones for you, if that's what you're after." Gone with her obsequiousness was her ready acceptance of his presence in a place where he wasn't technically supposed to be. It was a good change, even if it made conducting investigations and experiments more difficult.

Sherlock pulled up one of the lab stools and sat down. "I require your expertise," he said simply. This attracted Molly's full attention, and he allowed some of his confusion with his situation to show on his face. As he had hoped, she softened—though her infatuation had long since died away, a somewhat motherly regard had risen from its ashes in the wake of John's wedding. Sensing that she was waiting for him to present her with his problem, he began to speak. Molly was already aware of the big picture— she was one of the first people they had told, after all— but it was necessary she have the details. "I need to know exactly what I should do, Molly,exactly, so you must have sufficient background," he told her, insistent. She simply nodded, so Sherlock resumed his explanation.

Mary had left on a Thursday for a girls' weekend with Janine, John had taken off work to care for Isabelle, and Sherlock had been bored, which had resulted in John appearing in the door to 221B with two overnight bags and Isabelle in tow on Friday morning. Saturday's activities did involve Sherlock haranguing Lestrade over the phone for a case, but the vast majority of the day had been spent following Isabelle, who quizzed Sherlock on everything she could possibly ask about and listened to his answers with rapt, if not entirely comprehending, attention. Sunday had started in much the same way until around five thirty PM, at which point Lestrade had called Sherlock and John about a dead body in a locked room with a lobster where its viscera should have been. After depositing Isabelle with Mrs Hudson and leaving Mary a voicemail to go to 221B when she got back, John and Sherlock had caught a cab to the crime scene in Lambeth.

Sherlock had barely begun his preliminary analysis of the scene when John's phone had gone off. "I knew that expression, remembered it from… well." He shook his head, dispelling the memory of John's face as he had clutched at Sherlock's wrist and searched desperately for a pulse. "He didn't speak for several hours; when he did, it was to explain to Isabelle that her mother would not be coming home from Brighton. Later, he told me that there had been a collision on the A23; a petrol lorry had crossed the median and smashed into oncoming traffic." The incident had even been televised, but John had reacted so negatively to the sight that Sherlock had turned off the telly to save it from being upended.

"It hasn't been… easy," Sherlock admitted, head bowed. He understood psychology, he explained, but he had no real experience with supporting anyone through a loss, never mind someone like John. Isabelle was helping— she had recovered more quickly than John, being only three years old, and caring for her was keeping John from collapsing in on himself entirely— but John was just barely on the 'coping' side of the proverbial line, even four weeks after the fact.

Molly sighed. "A month isn't a very long time after a loss, Sherlock," she told him, gently reproving.

"I know," replied Sherlock, rolling his eyes. "The problem is that he feels duty-bound to deal with the estate and such, and I need to know how I'm supposed to offer help without making him angry or making him feel incompetent— he's always reacted poorly to that. Furthermore, I'm not entirely certain that handling this won't cause a relapse."

Smiling lopsidedly, Molly got to her feet. "Let me finish these panels," she said, "and I'll help you plan this." She laughed and shook her head. "Just promise me that you'll tell him the truth someday, Sherlock Holmes. I won't help you dance around this forever."

There was no point denying Molly's implication, not when it had been splashed across Appledore's portico in Magnussen's blood.

"Think what you will," he sighed. "Just tell me what I need to do."

* * *

Two hours and one perfectly executed plan of action later, John was eyeing Sherlock the same way he eyed any of the closed, opaque plastic containers on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator. "I thought you hated that sort of thing," he said. "You know. Paperwork, bureaucratic minutiae; said you were happy to leave it to all to Mycroft."

Sherlock sighed and scooped up his mobile phone from the coffee table as he passed. "So I do and so I am, generally; however, there are times when it merits my attention or, in this case, just enough of my attention to call in a favour to my dear, grasping brother." He paused in scrolling down his contacts list when the silence from the kitchen went on a bit longer than usual. "What?"

John was staring at him from across the kitchen table, apparently caught somewhere between disbelief and worry. "You're calling Mycroft."

Unbelievable, thought Sherlock. Was it really so strange that he was willing to do this for John after everything else he'd done? It wasn't as if he made a business of planning weddings or murdering blackmailers, never mindpledging his life to people and their happiness— what was it going to take? "I believe that is what I just explicitly stated I was doing," he retorted, unable to keep just a hint of snappish reproach out of his tone. It took all of his considerable self-control to find a civil response when John continued to look startled and skeptical. "He owes me a favour after the Bierer affair. I fail to see the reason for your confusion." If he didn't call Molly to demand an apology for her failure of a plan, he was going to call her to demand she explain why John, ostensibly the more emotionally competent of the two of them, almost went out of his way to be completely blind to everything Sherlock did for him.

John seemed to sense that he was treading thin ice. "Sorry, it's just… you never call Mycroft, not after he all but shipped you off to Serbia to die." Funny, Sherlock thought, how John took such issue with the Serbia assignment now when he had clearly been fully aware that it was a permanent goodbye on that tarmac; he had seemed perfectly content at the time to let Sherlock be shuffled off to a violent death. He raised an unimpressed eyebrow and John's cheeks went red as he understood that Sherlock was not going to let him pretend obliviousness to the significance of the offer of help. "I just think that. Well. That you don't need to do that, for me."

"I want to," Sherlock stated.

It was true, despite everything, and John knew it. "I… er, thank you. For doing that. You really don't need to, though. Really."

"As I said," Sherlock bit out, "he owes me." Frankly, Mycroft owed him a great deal more than a bit of paperwork, but he would likely only acknowledge the Bierer affair in their little running tally. As if Sherlock hadn't cleared up a dozen such situations for his brother before, only to be reminded of some years-old debt yet to be repaid—sometimes, Sherlock questioned his own sanity for allowing himself any sentimentality whatsoever. Let emotions in, he thought viciously, and suddenly you were the goldfish, trapped in a bowl of your own making and nibbling at whatever scraps of affection and respect people deigned to give you. He jabbed at his brother's name, hating himself, and lifted the phone to his ear.

"You owe me for the Bierer affair," he snapped as soon as the ring tone cut out.

There was quiet for a moment on the other end of the line. "Mr Holmes," said Anthea, and Sherlock sucked in a slow, deep breath.

Mycroft never left his personal phone with Anthea, not unless there was something so catastrophic happening that he had to prioritize his work over his private connections. "Where is my brother?" he demanded. John, halfway out of the kitchen, halted and looked back.

In the silence that followed, plausible reasons for Mycroft's absence crowded into Sherlock's head in droves. The Bilderberg convention wasn't due to happen for some time yet, and no upcoming elections were quite to the stage where Mycroft's machinations—never mind his personal, prioritized attentions—were necessary. The Bierer affair had been concluded over two months ago despite Russia's best efforts, and all avenues of reprisal had been firmly, thoroughly closed. He was vaguely aware that there were groups threatening violence against Western nations and leaders, too, but—

"He is dead, Mr Holmes."

* * *

For just a fraction of a second, Sherlock's face registered utter shock, and that was all the warning John had before the kitchen table was overturned with abrupt, unrestrained violence. Abandoning his tea, he waded through the spray of broken glass and chemical equipment, seizing Sherlock's arms in a grip that was meant to ground as much as restrain.

"What."

John stared up at Sherlock and tried to recall a time when he'd ever heard such a flat, disbelieving, almost offended tone out of the detective. The voice on the other end of the line—a woman, perhaps Anthea?—said something that sounded conciliatory and maybe a bit evasive, to which Sherlock immediately reacted by visibly bristling. "You mean to tell me, Anthea, that my brother has been dead for an entire month and no one could be bothered to contact me?"

John's jaw dropped. 'Dead' and 'Mycroft Holmes' were not normally words that John associated with each other, unless it was the latter inflicting the former on some poor sod by proxy. He tried to imagine what or who could possibly get to Mycroft Holmes and failed—the elder Holmes had always existed on such a rarefied, stratospheric level of society that he'd seemed perfectly untouchable.

"I want everything you have," Sherlock snarled into the phone, teeth bared. "No. I do not care about protocol, I do not care about your stupid security clearances. You will give me what I want, or I will tear it out of your archives myself." He paused, apparently listening to Anthea, then barked out a flat, bitter laugh. "She wants to know what she can do to make it up to me, John," he sneered. His grey eyes raked thoughtfully over John's face, arms, and hands. "I don't want your apologies or meaningless platitudes. I am giving you one hour. By the end of the hour, you will have done two things, Anthea: first, you will have sent me every iota of information relevant to the bombings, and second, you will have picked up the papers I will be leaving in the post box at 221B. After that, you will have two days, by the end of which I expect probate to be taken care of for both myself and for Doctor Watson. Am I understood?" He paused, waiting for an answer. "Good. Get on it." With that, he ended the call.

Squeezing his arms to get his attention, John looked up at Sherlock with concern. He wasn't sure how he'd made such a hash of their conversation before the phone call, but damned if he wouldn't do his best to make up for his mistakes, whatever they were. "Do you want to… I don't know, talk about it?" It sounded as lame as he expected. He knew he wasn't supposed to just ask 'is your brother dead', but he was a doctor, not a grief counselor—quite frankly, he had no idea what to do in this situation. "Are you all right?"

For a moment, it felt as if John was being peeled open in Sherlock's head. "Mycroft was staying in downtown Atlanta at the time of the bombing last month," he said at length. "MI6 believes he is dead."

"You don't?" John asked.

Sherlock's nimble fingers firmly disengaged John's grips on his arms. "Not yet."

"Not yet?" John echoed, incredulous. "Sherlock, they levelled half a city block with a dirty bomb. How the hell could he have survived that?"

Case files and boxes of miscellanea thumped and clattered to the floor as Sherlock retrieved his armada of laptops from their hiding places about the sitting room. "Absence of evidence, John, as opposed to evidence of absence." One after the other, the laptops were arranged on the coffee table just so. "Item the first: MI6 cannot find Mycroft. Item the second: Mycroft was in Atlanta at the time of the bombing, and though his presence at the hotel at the epicentre of the explosion was not explicitly stated, it was very heavily implied. What can we infer from those two items, John?"

Any guilt or confusion that John was still feeling over whatever he'd fucked up in their earlier conversation was quickly giving way to worry. "Sherlock," he began to say.

"Nothing!" Sherlock barked, clattering away at one of the laptops. "Nothing of any importance whatsoever, John! So he's missing and there was a bomb at his hotel; how does that incontrovertibly add up to 'he's dead' to anyone but an idiot?"

John stared at his friend in alarmed disbelief. "All right. Item the third, Sherlock. Your brother's hotel was blown apart by a bomb packed full of nuclear waste. Really, I want to know. How does that not add up to 'he's dead'?"

The look John got for that was a wretched amalgam of denial and disgust; almost instantly, he regretted what he'd said. "Listen. I know it's… it's not easy to accept it when… you know, you lose someone." He swallowed. He hated talking about loss—hated talking about feelings period, really—but the way Sherlock was behaving was painfully, intimately familiar. "It. Takes a while, you know. For it to… to set in. I spen—er. You can spend days thinking you'll. Ah. See the person again, you know. Like they'll just walk in and it'll all be some... magic trick, or you'll wake up, and it'll just be a nightmare. But sometimes it isn't, and… it's okay, but you have to. You know. Accept it."

Sherlock's expression, shuttered and suspicious at first, progressively sank into a shape John had been seeing more and more often, though only in unguarded moments. He still couldn't suss out what meant and, as ever, it was only there long enough to leave John with the same sort of uneasy feeling he got when peering into deep, dark water. "I have to have proof, John," Sherlock said, meeting John's eyes directly. Big hands cupped John's shoulders and turned him in place. "You heard the conversation. Go get your wife's papers and put them in the post box." With a gentle shove, Sherlock sent John on his way.

* * *

The envelope was the same sort used for magazines or business papers in the post; sturdy, matte white paper with a little two-pronged metal fastener that further secured the glued flap. It didn't weigh more than one of his paperback books, yet it felt like lead in John's hands.

He and Mary hadn't been one of those perfect couples, not by any stretch. She'd kept her identity a secret from him and had only avoided murdering his best friend because Sherlock Holmes was apparently excused from obeying all medical and anatomical laws. He kept an illegal firearm in the same flat as a toddler, veered dangerously close to the 'alcoholic' line at times, and struggled with violent reactions when he lost control over his temper. He hated it when she disappeared for days with Janine and their friend Annie, she hated it when John disappeared for days on cases with Sherlock… it seemed at times that they loved each other almost in spite of those things, or perhaps because they were each other's antidote as much as they were the other's poison. It helped, too, that they were madly, utterly in love with Isabelle—she was their little honey bee, the innocent child they both missed in themselves, and they had agreed almost as soon as the little blue plus had appeared that they would do everything in their power to keep her safe, loved, happy, and healthy. United in their mutual, total adoration for Izzy, their relationship had never been stronger.

Now, he mostly just wondered if there was something wrong with him.

The first two days after getting word of her death had been spent sleeping, crying behind the closed door of his old bedroom at 221B, and caring for Isabelle, who wouldn't speak again until nearly a week after the fact. Past that, however, real life and its attendant responsibilities couldn't be ignored any longer, and John had been forced to work through his grief. Not long after that, 'working through' became 'setting aside' and, just last week, John had suddenly realized in the middle of seeing to a patient that he'd gone an entire two days without thinking about Mary.

The realisation had shaken John so badly that even Sherlock had noticed. He couldn't imagine that it was right of him to get over losing Mary so quickly—she was his wife, the mother of his daughter! What did it say about him as a person that he was already compartmentalizing away that part of his life only three weeks after the fact? He'd thought about going to Ella and asking for her opinion, but the sense of shame over his own failure to grieve his wife the way he was supposed to was so intense that he couldn't bring himself to so much as pick up his phone. Instead, he'd gone out with Izzy and Sherlock, picked up Indian takeaway from Mary's favourite restaurant, and eaten together in Mary's favourite spot in Regent's Park; in the end, John had only felt worse for being so pathetically transparent.

Now, prying up the prongs of the fastener on the envelope containing a record of all of Mary's worldly possessions and her wishes for them, he felt a sudden rush of nausea. His wife was dead, he was such a shit husband that he couldn't even mourn her properly, and here he was with their daughter on one knee and her will in his hands, mulling over how best to get rid of her clothes, her books, and her jewellry. "I hate this," he gritted out.

Across the table, Sherlock appeared to be searching for the right thing to say. It took time, but John was curious and wanted nothing more than a reason to delay opening the envelope. "The commodification of a person's effects after death is an ugly reality of many cultures," Sherlock replied at length. The lack of smug superiority in his tone was as close to caution as John knew he would get.

"Papa open it!" Isabelle piped up from her perch on one of John's legs. When John and Sherlock both paused to look at her, she put the fingers of one hand in her mouth and added, "Peas."

John shrugged. "Not much else for it, is there?" Picking up the letter opener Sherlock had produced from one of his many drawers of miscellanea, he slid the blade under the flap and slit the envelope. The contents were packed tightly into the envelope and, when John wriggled a finger between the paper and its contents, he was surprised to find that the sheets felt slick and glossy, almost like plastic. "Huh. That's odd." Tugging the sheaf free, he set it on the table in front of him and frowned.

Every sheet in the pile was the same shiny, silvery white material.

Stranger still, every sheet in the pile was blank.


	4. Chapter 4

Trains are phenomenally conducive to writing. More than three quarters of this was written in transit between Union Station and home; I feel like I should visit downtown Chicago more often if it means train rides to get writing done.

Granted, time to make the trip is necessary. I've been working super overtime, and while the money is excellent, I've been a) strapped for spare time and b) mostly asleep when at home. As such, let me know if you spot errors, as my proofreading might not have been perfect. :)

* * *

Every institution with an historical campus had its proverbial crown jewel, a building singled out from the rest as an exemplar of the institution's achievements, history, or ideals. Old as it was, Rudbridge's was one of those institutions, and, being an academy, its library was treated as the paragon of all things Rudbridge.

Unlike the favoured buildings of some institutions, the Maurice Rudbridge Memorial Library actually merited its vaunted status, even if the academy itself never quite lived up to the standards the Library was meant to symbolise. Designed and built at the height of the Gothic Revival movement, it was one of those buildings whose worked-stone exteriors led passers-by to pause and take note and whose glowing, polished oak and cherry interiors quieted visitors more effectively than any policy or curator. That quiet, more than anything, was what drew Archie to the library every weekend. The books did a fine job of it, too—the Library boasted just as many upper-level texts and references as it did novels and class books for the typical secondary school student—but quiet had a gravity all its own, and Archie was wholly caught in its orbit.

The week after meeting the man with the wizard's eyes had been a fraught one. With Uncle Ulysses still huffing and puffing over the man's presence, Archie had decided to delay a second visit until he could be certain that he wouldn't get assigned a roommate 'for his own good'. He'd arrived at school on Monday to learn that his teacher was out after having an emergency surgery, and the substitute was strict bordering on despotic. Archie had completed his maths and science homework for the week, but he still had a paper on 'any single topic he wanted' that had to be done, and he couldn't for the life of him settle on just one thing to write about, never mind keep himself to under seven pages as the substitute had asked. On top of all of that, three of Uncle Ulysses' students had started taking out their classroom frustration on Archie, making it impossible to eat his dinner or spend his weekends in peace anywhere outside of his room or the Library.

"Morning, Mr West," Bette said as Archie shuffled past her desk. "Long week, was it?"

Archie still found a smile for the elderly librarian despite his weariness. Tiny and perfectly coiffed, Bette had been a fixture at the Library for as long as Archie had been visiting, and often seemed as unchanging as the building itself. She was so ever-present that, were she to miss a day, Archie might very well phone the police. He appreciated her constancy; she was as much a part of the Library he'd come to love as any of the shelves, portraits, or books. "Yeah," he said. "It's good to have some quiet."

Bette smiled. She liked Archie, even though their interactions had never gone beyond greetings and farewells as he arrived and departed. "Stay as long as you like, Mr West. You're always welcome here."

Superficial though their interactions were, Bette's warmth always left Archie feeling a bit better. He made his way back to the 900s with a bit more of a spring in his step—with the whole of Saturday in front of him and the entire Library open to his perusal, he felt confident that he could make a start on his paper at the very least.

Archie unloaded his laptop (another gift 'with love from Mummy and Steve', also received during the winter hols by post), his notebook, and the list of potential topics he'd considered for the paper as he settled in at his favourite table. Most of them were historical; Archie had always had a head for collating facts (something Sherlock had noticed), but he had discovered a particular strength in finding patterns in the way people and groups of people acted, and what was history but a timeline describing the way various peoples had acted and interacted? What he needed now were sources, but good ones— as much as he could understand why his school's library only stocked oversimplified summaries and biographical blurbs, it was still irritating to be forced to resort to other locations for fuller, more nuanced accounts.

A long-fingered hand bearing a golden band on the ring finger broke into Archie's field of view, startling him out of his thoughts, and picked up the paper with his list of potential topics. Twisting in his seat, Archie swallowed his protests—the man with the wizard's eyes was standing beside the table and seemed very focussed on Archie's list. "Mr… er. Sir?"

"Jensen," the man with the wizard's eyes responded lightly, glancing over Archie briefly. He returned the paper. "Your week has not been kind to you, I perceive."

Archie wasn't sure whether to be awed, ashamed, or relieved by the way Mr Jensen seemed to just know after only a glance. "No, sir."

Mr Jensen pulled out the chair next to Archie's and placed his bag on the table as well. Most of the things that he unpacked were unremarkable and handled casually, but Archie noticed the way Mr Jensen's hands lingered for a few moments over two items— one, a battered little black notebook, and the other, a beautiful, slim pen of lacquered cherry. They were important without a doubt, but Archie could only imagine why. "In my experience, with the right help, one can wring some good out of an unkind week." Flipping open a binder, Mr Jensen perused a schedule and what appeared to be notes or a lesson plan before turning his dark eyes back onto Archie. "Your choice of subjects is interesting. Have you decided?"

"No sir," said Archie.

Mr Jensen didn't smile or nod, but Archie suspected he would have, were he a more smiling sort of person. "Very good, Archibald. Come with me; I suspect I can offer some assistance in my spare time."

Archie nodded and scrambled to his feet.

* * *

"It isn't unusual for someone your age to be interested in war and warfare," Mr Jensen said as they strolled through the 300 shelves, "and I suppose an awareness of politics is increasingly typical in today's world, but I have found that that awareness only rarely moves beyond partisan talking points, even in adults."

Archie shrugged. "Looking at things from only one side made it impossible to guess what would happen," he said, "so I stopped." At least, he had stopped inasmuch as his guesses went. He still had his own opinions, of course but they never factored into the guesses he made—he hated being wrong more than he hated losing. He was getting much, much better at the guessing, too, especially since getting his laptop and access to the Internet.

"Guess?" Mr Jensen echoed, looking down at Archie briefly.

"Mhm," Archie said. "I used to read old newspapers and history books, and I started seeing patterns in how things happened. It was kind of like a game. I read about little things, made a guess based on that pattern, and then read more to find out if I was right. Like.. money. There are a lot of patterns with money. Big ones." So big they were impossible to miss, really; money patterns had been some of the very first that had stood out clearly to him.

Mr Jensen had stopped midway through taking a book from the shelf. "Oh?" He was _looking_ at Archie; yet again, Archie wondered just who Mr Jensen really was, to have such a _pressure_ behind his gaze. Teachers generally had an intense 'look' that they could turn on and off as they needed it, but this was a whole different level of focus. "What sort of patterns?"

Archie looked up at Mr Jensen, incredulous. No one had ever afforded his patterns even the slightest import, never mind legitimacy; having them suddenly treated like some sort of groundbreaking scientific discovery was downright jarring. Still… someone was listening. How could he resist? "Not good ones," he admitted. Most of the money patterns he saw were the kinds that led to violence. "When it's just a person, they don't act the same if they've got too little or too much money, and the ones without enough start hating the ones with too much. When it's groups of people, it's worse." He looked up at Mr Jensen and, for a very brief moment, witnessed an expression of… not pity or empathy, but _sympathy— he understood._ "You see them too, don't you?" he asked quietly.

Mr Jensen nodded. "I do."

"All the time?"

Another solemn nod.

Archie let his eyes rove over the titles on the shelf next to him. They were standing next to a section on Margaret Thatcher; somehow, given the topic of conversation, it seemed apropos to be looking at titles about a leader whose legacy was so heavily tangled in money and money-making. "Then you know what I mean when I say money patterns aren't good." It had taken him a long, long time to come to terms with what he was seeing, especially when so many of the signs pointed to a dangerous confluence of long- and short-term patterns. He hadn't wanted to believe that the modern world and all of its progress could still leave room for such possibilities, but too many of the dimmer outcomes had become reality for him to deny it any longer. "Money lets people do whatever they want if they have enough of it, Mr Jensen. With enough of it, you can buy _anything_." He suspected he didn't need to spell out what that meant to Mr Jensen; a glance up confirmed that hunch. "It's dangerous if no one's watching over it."

Mr Jensen pulled one of the books on Margaret Thatcher, made briskly for another section of shelf, this one devoted to someone named Keynes, and pulled another book. "Do you mean controlling who gets the money?" A book on a 'Milton Friedman' joined the other two; it was flipped through by deft, well-practiced hands before being shelved and replaced with a different book on the same man.

Archie made a face. "No. It works as an idea, but to do the idea, you have to have _people_ in charge of it." He hardly needed to explain why _that_ bodged everything up.

"Do you mean to say, then, that there should be no controls?"

Archie looked up at Mr Jensen. He thought for a moment of his mother and the blank aspect she took on sometimes when she talked with him, the way her face would seem to close like shutters on a window. For another moment, he marvelled—looking up at Mr Jensen, his mother's 'blank' suddenly resembled nothing so much as a caricature, emotions exaggerated almost to the point of morbidity. It was as if he was suddenly in the company of a man carved from living, indifferent ice, and he suspected immediately that he was being tested. "That's just as stupid," he replied, blunt and honest. Mr Jensen's flawless, pleasant inscrutability didn't waver; Archie's suspicion ticked over into near-certainty. Mr Jensen had no reason to be so actively diplomatic, so his only reason for expending the extra effort was because Archie had proven worthy of it.

Unless, of course, it was a double bluff, and Mr Jensen was feeding him a false sense of self-importance for his own entertainment. Or, perhaps, it was a triple bluff, designed not only to assess Archie's analyses of patterns but to evaluate any tendencies to paranoia. Regardless, Archie determined to treat the situation at face value: he was learning a great deal from Mr Jensen simply by observation, after all, and it really wouldn't be very productive to end their interactions early by failing or seeming unduly suspicious. "It's sort of like a classroom," he continued. "If the teacher is too controlling, the students are too angry or scared to learn. If the teacher treats them all like they're the same, the struggling ones get left behind and the advanced ones don't learn the way they could. If the teacher just doesn't control them at all, no one learns anything unless they want to, and even then it's probably not anything useful in real life."

Mr Jensen pulled down another book (_Will and Political Legitimacy_) and added it to the three he was already carrying. "You're right, of course, even if the metaphor is somewhat simple," he said once they were back at the table. He set the books down in front of Archie. "I suspect you know the complicating factors quite well, however, and believe you will find these resources to be both relevant and quite interesting." Mr Jensen then turned to his binder and lifted a stack of what appeared to be exams to be marked. His hands were delicate and almost reverent as he picked up the lacquered pen and tested the nib. "If you have any questions, do feel welcome to ask. Marking is tedious at best, and I will undoubtedly welcome the distraction."

Archie nodded. Picking up _Will and Political Legitimacy_, he opened the book to its first page and settled in to read.

* * *

I love the idea that Archie took to Sherlock so well because he's a little genius, too, just a bit quieter about it.

I can't promise I'll be able to update next week, or even the week after; hopefully the demands work is making will ease off and I'll have more time and energy to put into this story. Also, I want to thank you for reading! It means a lot to me that people seem to be interested in this piece; I really hope that it'll do right by your interest as the plot continues to unfold. :)


	5. Chapter 5

Holiday retail in an extremely affluent, aged demographic region is hell. I could regale you with all manner of horror stories, but I'll be brief and leave it at this: Veruca Salt is starting to look like a goddamn saint.

That and 'so much overtime' are all the excuses I really have for failing to get any writing done until this past week. :(

Let me know if you spot any typos or glaring errors; I've proofread a few times, but it's possible I've missed things. Deepest apologies for the long wait, and I hope the chapter's up to snuff.

* * *

It was unusual for Sherlock to find himself at a loss for truly useful conclusions.

Surprise was not a part of it, not really. He'd always known that Mary's death, whenever it happened, would throw back the veil on parts of her past in some way or another. Moreover, he had always known that 'some way or another' would invariably involve levels of obfuscation that would make his brother's pretentious air of mystery seem practical in comparison, for Mary was nothing if not house-proud of her secrets and secret-keeping. Still, he had expected some semblance of lenience out of respect for John or Isabelle, especially in the event of her premature death— for all of the smoke and mirrors she shrouded herself with, her love for John and her daughter was not something Sherlock had ever had reason to question.

That indisputable love for John, when taken in conjunction with the unexpectedly inscrutable 'will', led Sherlock to wonder why Mary had opted for no-holds-barred perplexion, which in turn led to his first conclusion— whatever her past involved, it posed some sort of threat. His first instinct was to assume that the threat was a direct one to John and Isabelle, but he also knew that Mary felt very little guilt in keeping secrets from her family if it would protect them from harm. Had the threat been a direct one to John or Isabelle, she would have provided a typical will, nothing untoward or unusual whatsoever; therefore, given the fact that she had arranged for John to receive the papers, it was implied that—

John's chair scraped horribly as he shoved himself to his feet, startling Sherlock badly. "Unbelievable," John growled. His breathing was ragged, wrecked; he gripped the handles of the liquor cabinet with shaking hands and bowed his head, visibly warring with himself.

A tense, wide-eyed quiet reigned for a time as Sherlock and Isabelle both stared at John and wondered if there would be more to the outburst. It was Isabelle, however, who found her voice first—while Sherlock was no stranger to the full brunt of John's temper, it was likely that Isabelle hadn't witnessed much more than minor frustrations in the past. "Papa?"

John's shoulders sagged at the sound of his daughter's hesitant call. Turning, he went to her chair and dropped to his knees, pulling her into his arms. "Oh, love," he exhaled, unsteady. "It's alright, love. I'm sorry. I'm sorry." He hid his face in her hair as he cradled her against his shoulder. "Papa's, er… very… confused, right now. And, ah. Sad."

"Oh," said Isabelle. "Why?"

Sherlock then watched and listened curiously as a very strange thing happened: haltingly, awkwardly, John Watson deliberately bared and explained his confusion, sadness, and vulnerability.

It was a striking departure from baseline John Watson. In Sherlock's experience, John only spoke openly about his emotions when faced with death, be it his own or someone else's; apparently, Isabelle was the exception to prove the rule. He supposed that there was some sort of societal expectation of emotional honesty from parents with very young children, then, for John to do something so contrary to his nature, and was briefly thankful that Isabelle was neither his child nor his responsibility. Maintaining a _friendship_ was quite fraught enough for his tastes, and no doubt the consequences for failing as a parent were much steeper.

Simple and vague though it had been, John's explanation seemed to satisfy Isabelle; she levered herself down from her chair and made for the sitting room, where Sherlock's magnifier and one of her colouring books sat open and waiting. John got to his feet and dropped into the vacated chair. "Er. Right, then," he said, avoiding eye contact. His cheeks were pink. "Let's get to the bottom of this; I want the truth."

"Yes," Sherlock agreed, and went along with John in pretending that he hadn't witnessed (never mind closely observed) a moment of total vulnerability on the doctor's part.

The truth, unfortunately, was an elusive quarry.

Without knowing what the silvery, not-quite-paper was, both Sherlock and John were wary of damaging it— if it did contain information of some sort, they couldn't be sure that removing even a tiny piece for a chemical analysis wouldn't deprive them of data they sorely needed. So far, Sherlock had determined that the stuff was most likely a coated paper of some sort, as peering at the edges revealed a thin, white core tightly sandwiched between layers of smooth, silvery material.

In the course of their more meticulous examination of the pile, however, Sherlock and John had discovered several grainy, poor-quality pictures clinging to the backs of a few of the silvered sheets. They'd arranged the flimsy prints on the table for examination, but there wasn't a lot to say about a picture of a house in the country, a shot of 20 and 22 Whitehall, a 1933 Aston Martin advertisement, a reprint of a film poster for a movie called _The Wolf of Wall Street_, and the photo Sherlock had taken of John, Mary, and their daughter on the day of her birth. John had departed the kitchen and 'gone out for air' upon discovering that last image; upon returning with takeaway curry in hand, he had been very studiously avoiding the image and the part of the table it occupied. Sherlock suspected he was meant to offer comfort, but frustration over the utter lack of concrete, rational connections between the images and their subjects was ruling much of his thinking.

Isabelle, who had been attracted back to the kitchen table by the pictures her father was looking at, kicked her feet and planted the magnifier on the table with a clack. "Papa?" She gave her father the wide, gap-toothed smile that typically preceded her asking John for help or a favour. When John gave a grunt of acknowledgement from where he was spooning curry into bowls, she continued, "Papa, what house story say?"

Sherlock looked up from his work and John turned away from the curry. "That's a picture of a house, busy bee. There aren't any words to read," he told her, patient. Sherlock could see him fighting to keep his eyes away from the picture of his wife.

Isabelle pursed her lips in a perfect miniature of John's 'consternation/thought' expression as her brow furrowed in perplexity. She turned and peered through the magnifier, then looked back up at her father. "Papa," she said, almost as if to say 'I'm not an idiot, I can see that it is in fact a picture'. "Many words! You come read house story, please." Her tone brooked no argument; John would be coming to read and that was that.

Though it was John that Isabelle summoned, Sherlock got to his feet and strode around the table to join her—Isabelle was headstrong, but she was very rarely so demanding. He and John leaned over her shoulders, their heads almost bumping, and watched as she painstakingly lifted the magnifier just enough to bring part of the picture into focus.

"Wow," John breathed. "Sherlock, those are…"

Sherlock took Isabelle's tiny hands in his own gentle grip, adjusting the magnifier and then scanning over the photograph. Without magnification, the ink dots were just dots, but with it, it became very clear that every dot was made of minuscule rows of text. It had been over two decades since Sherlock had last seen microdots used, but there was no forgetting such things, not when the last time he'd seen them had been just before failing to prevent a series of brutal beatings targeting expatriated Russian dissidents.

He would not fail to heed the signs this time. "John, we're behind on spring cleaning."

Next to him, John stiffened and clenched his fists around the back of Isabelle's chair. 'Spring cleaning' had once been a lighthearted jest at clearing out Mycroft's monthly bugs, taps, and wires, but now it was a stark reminder of the campaign of terror the organisation behind 'Moriarty' rising from the dead had waged. "Right," he gritted out.

When John began to move again, it was with a focus and _tension_ that had the hairs on the back of Sherlock's neck standing on end—seven years of dormancy, it seemed, did not dull the razor edge from his military training. Isabelle seemed to sense it, too, and hid her face in her father's shoulder when he picked her up from her chair. "I want this place scoured, Sherlock," John bit out, arms curling around Isabelle. "I have calls to make; I'll help you when I'm done." When he left for his room upstairs, it was with a clean, sharp about-face that drew a startled giggle out of Isabelle.

Sherlock considered following to listen in; reconsidered. John would defer to him on the technical aspects of what they were doing, but his phone calls undoubtedly had to do with Isabelle, and things to do with Isabelle were _Not Sherlock's Fucking Business Thank You_. Filling a flask with water, he turned his mind to Isabelle's discovery and began a systematic search of the flat.

He had to admit to some considerable shame. For a three-year-old at play to spot the microdots when Sherlock should have been going over the photographs with a fine lens right from the start was damning indeed. "Idiot," he growled, and plucked a tiny camera from its perch in the side of a bookshelf. It was the work of a moment to crack the thin casing and drop it into the flask. "Bumbling, complacent imbecile." He slammed some doors and threw open others in various parts of his Mind Palace; expectations of relative domesticity and comfort were locked away in favour of old paranoias and siege mentalities. It wasn't certain that there was any serious threat to him, John, or Isabelle, but Sherlock would be damned if he let that uncertainty leave them open to harm.

"Your parents will be here by five," John said without preamble when he came back downstairs. He had his Army duffel over one shoulder; an open zip revealed Isabelle's clothing instead of his own. "They'll take Izzy until we're done." He settled Isabelle on the couch with one of her cardboard books, some paper, and a handful of crayons, watched her for a moment, and then joined Sherlock at the other end of the room. He frowned as Sherlock carefully peeled back a loose wallpaper corner, feeling at the plaster beneath it. "Seems like overkill."

Sherlock plucked one particularly obvious bug from its perch and rapped it smartly against the mantel. When the casing cracked, he pried it apart and showed John the empty interior. "Impossible to be too meticulous. Begin from the opposite corner, and we'll meet in the middle."

Nodding, John made his way back to the couch and started his half of the search.

* * *

"So," John said once he emerged from Tesco with two cheap mobile phones in hand, "microdots? Thought those went out with the Cold War?"

Sherlock traded Isabelle for the mobile phones, hailed a cab, and directed the driver to take the long route to Baker Street. "Yes and no," he replied.

Intelligence agencies, he explained, liked people to think that they used only the most cutting-edge technology available for encrypting data and communications, but in a world where even the most secure digital archives were being cracked into with increasing regularity and depth, it was occasionally the better move to revert to traditional methods of subterfuge and intrigue. Sensitive papers, after all, could not be hacked and made unkillable through Internet dissemination, not without a great deal of effort and good fortune on the part of the party attempting to intercept them. Even with CCTV use as widespread as it was, the cameras were a tattered net indeed compared to the Internet, where every movement— indeed, every keystroke— could be monitored. In the analogue world, drop points could be established and re-established with signals indistinguishable from the day-to-day hubbub of the city, agents could change their appearances and modes of travel in moments, and there were thousands if not tens of thousands of vectors by which to convey hidden information. "We received ours in the form of a last will and testament, John. They can be anywhere, anything: receipts, university degrees, tabloid newspapers, napkins, a particular arrangement of flowers in the window of a shop. Most importantly, however, the delivery agents are human— no IP addresses, no constant connection to the World Wide Web, just a single mind, open to no one but itself, in a single body, alone in a crowd."

John raised his eyebrows. "You think Mary was a part of all that?" He looked caught between frustration and disbelief. "She couldn't have been. I would have known."

"Do you really think anyone involved with a secret agent knows it?" Sherlock gave John an expectant look and then put on Trust-Fund-Thirtysomething-Married-One-Point-Eight-Children. "'Hello, love, just home from a real corker in Moscow," he chirped. "You wouldn't believe what old Blighty's got brewing right under Putin's nose!'"

John rolled his eyes and tried to give Sherlock a quelling glare, but Isabelle gave such a delighted, bewildered bark of laughter at his character acting that any (frankly justified) anger John had worked up dissipated almost instantly. "All right, all right," he grumbled, "point made, I'm a moron, what else is new? So let's say Mary was some sort of secret agent. Do you think her death had something to do with it?" Quite abruptly, he blanched. "Sherlock. How do we know that she's actually dead?"

"We don't," Sherlock answered honestly, even though he had the distinct feeling that this was one of those times when social norms would have dictated that he remain silent or lie through his teeth. John might have been methodical and sentimental, but he wasn't stupid, and Sherlock doubted he'd appreciate being patronised. He stared at John until the doctor lifted his gaze. "John, believe me when I say that we will get to the truth of this matter." This was the truth, too; as infuriating and unintentionally hurtful as John was at times, Sherlock would move mountains (plan weddings, spill blood) for him. It was one of his greatest failings— and one of his greatest points of pride. "I will not fail you in this." The hand he had resting on the seat between them moved instinctively, curling over John's bicep before Sherlock could quite stop it.

For a moment, he and John stared at that hand without breaking eye contact; though Sherlock could pinpoint no logical reason for it, the back of the cab in that moment felt exactly like the air before a summer storm broke— stretched taut and full, breathless, heavy.

Very deliberately, still not breaking eye contact, John lifted his own hand and placed it over Sherlock's. "Thank you," he said, and then his hand went back to Isabelle's shoulder as he leaned against the window and watched London slide past.

Inexplicably electrified, Sherlock tried and failed to ignore the distinct sensation of _unfurling_ that radiated outward from his racing heart.


End file.
